


Magic Boxes (The What Remains Mix)

by Glinda



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Remix, Robots, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:59:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4180740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Howard builds magic boxes and out of them come weapons. Tony is his greatest creation and his worst nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. No Hope Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Magic Boxes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2414477) by [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki). 



> The quotes are from _Enola Gay_ by OMD which was on repeat for a lot of the writing of this story. Many thanks to IB for the massively helpful dialogue beta on chapter 1. All remaining mistakes are my own.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magic Boxes (The No Hope Remains Mix)

_Is mother proud of little boy today  
this kiss you give, it's never ever gonna fade away_

People who know about the work that Howard Stark did during the war presume that if he has nightmares, they are about the things he saw in the course of his work with the Howling Commandos. Nazi atrocities and alien weapons, super soldiers and far less consensual human experiments. (His dreams aren’t tinted blue with the light of the Tesseract, but gold and blinding white.) They presume that the thousands of dollars and countless hours that he has poured into the search for Captain America is some sort of misplaced guilt, for having helped create a super-soldier and then being unable to save him. (The blinding light of the artic summer gives him flashbacks and the smell of sunscreen makes him feel like throwing up but he battles on.) It isn’t true, though few know it, perhaps the Howling Commandos between them could patch the truth together from the bits and pieces he’s let slip over the years, but if they do then they’re keeping it to themselves. Howard’s job for the military has always been to build magic boxes to contain every more terrible weapons. (Mushroom clouds haunt his dreams, but he’s packaged weaponry that really does set the air on fire.) He’s very good at it and despite his doubts, he’s a patriot and he never did know how to say no and mean it. Steve Rogers was the only weapon he’s had a hand in the making of, about which he can feel unashamedly proud. His nightmares drive the search, but it isn’t his forgiveness Howard seeks, but his condemnation. Rogers is the only person he thinks could make him stop, make this constant, deepening spiral of destruction and making ever more horrific weaponry end. Could save him from himself. 

Every one of his magic boxes spit out a bouncing baby weapon, deadly and terrible. One thing Howard is certain of is that he should never ever reproduce. He may not have the strength to stop himself building weapons, but he can certainly stop himself creating a little replica of himself to take over the work when he’s gone. He takes all possible precautions and by the time he finally marries, he reckons between his age and the sheer volume of radiation he’s been exposed to over the years it should be safe. So when Maria presents him with a tiny new human he wants desperately to believe that this is not his child, but the baby boy looks up at him with his own eyes and he cannot deny the truth. His greatest creation he tells his wife, as she preens glowingly over their baby, and does not let himself think about why the words make his blood run cold. 

~

Sometimes he dreams of his little boy, thirty feet tall and crushing skyscrapers beneath his giant toddler-clumsy feet. Squealing with delight as fire rains down on familiar looking cities; pointing at things and laughing happily when they explode. He wakes up in a cold sweat and goes to check on Tony. He longs to pick him up and cuddle him tightly, bury his face in soft hair and sleepy toddler affection, and beg forgiveness from someone too young to understand that Howard does not deserve it. Instead he just watches Tony sleep for a while, not daring to wake him. If he stirs at all Howard will leave, crack open a bottle of whiskey and get back to work. Either way he always ends up back in the lab. Hiding from warm laughter and unconditional love, as if by keeping enough distance he can somehow keep his child uncontaminated. It doesn’t work. 

~

Tony is eight years old when he designs his first real weapon. The patent has Howard’s name on it less because he thinks that the patent office won’t believe the truth, but because he fears what might happen if they do believe it. If anyone does. 

He may no longer be part of SHIELD but he still does enough work for them that he can get an audience with the Director at fairly short notice. And because he and Peggy Carter have known each other for approximately ever, she turns up much sooner than expected. He’s therefor half way through a bottle of scotch, but because she’s a better friend than he deserves, she doesn’t turn on her heel. Instead she grabs a glass of her own, takes off her metaphorical Director hat, sits down across the bench from him and waits for him to tell her what’s wrong. 

Maybe it’s the scotch, maybe its Peggy’s spy skills, or maybe he just really needs to talk to someone who’s been there, done that, and had the nightmares. Whatever the reason Howard tells her everything, all his hopes and fears about Anthony - child prodigy, baby engineer, his greatest creation and worst nightmare – the nightmares of fire and ice he can’t shake all these years later. 

“You’re scared of him,” Peggy says into the following silence. Her tone is even, stating fact, her face wiped clean of her earlier concern and confusion. Not passing judgement, just accumulating the facts and assessing them. She’s good, he tells himself, there’s no shame in spilling his secrets to her, she’s a professional – he never stood a chance. 

“I create magic boxes and weapons come out of them, Peg; I shouldn’t really be surprised that I created a kid and he turned out to be a weapon too.” It feels like a weight lifting off saying that out loud. Finally. 

“There were plenty people involved in Project Rebirth who saw Steve as nothing but a weapon. Plenty more who remember him as nothing more than that, but you and I, we knew the man. We may have seen the weapon in action, but we followed the man beneath the uniform.”

“The human heart at the core of the weapon,” he interjects. 

“Yes,” she agrees. “Human and fallible with a fierce intolerance for bullies and injustice. A conscience, constantly nagging at himself and at us, to be the best we possibly could be, to fight monsters without becoming them ourselves. The history books and the films and the comics, they get it wrong. The clean cut, obedient, all-American hero is a fiction. The Steve Rogers I remember, that we knew, was stubborn and cranky, he rescued an entire battalion and led them out of enemy territory and he disobeyed orders to do it, because he wouldn’t leave his best friend to die.” She rocked her glass gently round and round its rim, frowning at it as though she could see the past in it. 

“If Tony is designing weapons at eight, its because its all that he sees all that he knows. I get that he’s scarily smart for his age, his peer group is vanishingly small but it exists and he needs to interact with them. He needs to understand that there’s more than weapons and war.” She’s not looking at her glass anymore, and her gaze when he meets it is fierce and determined. He shies away from it. 

“Give him someone easier to impress, because he only has you to show off to right now and apparently he thinks the way to do that is by building new and innovative weapons. Tony might well sign up to be a weapon for the military or for SHIELD, but he’s eight, that’s a choice that’s years ahead of him. You need to stop acting like he’s already made it. If he’s going to follow in Steve’s footsteps he will, but if he’s going to be Steve Rogers, he needs a James Barnes to get into scrapes with and to pull each other out of trouble in turn.”

She’s right, he thinks, after Peggy has gone. If Tony stays here with him, he’ll be designing weapons of mass destruction by the time he’s in his teens. The kid is brilliant, smart and shining like the sun; it will be impossible to keep that under wraps. Stark Industries is the number one supplier of arms to the US military and SHIELD; he is too enmeshed in the structure to extract them from this now. Carter would understand if he pulled out, they’ve talked before about how over-dependant SHIELD is on Stark Technology (they both know he can’t say no when she offers him a challenge; that she doesn’t really trust anyone but him to solve those problems) but even the Director of SHIELD is answerable to others, and those others will be far less understanding. If Tony is ever to understand that there is more to science and technology then weapons, ever to have a choice to be anything other than another merchant of death then he needs out of this oppressive, weapons obsessed environment. He wants flying cars and helper robots for his son; not tanks and drones. If Tony is ever to have that then he needs to get the hell away from his old man, Howard is certain of that. He knows Maria thinks Tony is too young to go away to school but Howard realises now that there is no choice. It breaks his heart to send him away, but for all his much-vaunted imagination he can’t think of any other way to save his child.

_it shouldn't ever have to end this way  
Aha enola gay, it shouldn't fade in our dreams away_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story can be read in two ways. Either this chapter as a stand alone, which I feel is truer to the spirit of remix. Sometimes when you start writing a story it evolves into something else instead and that very much happened with this story. It went somewhere else and I felt it sort of stopped being a remix of Magic Boxes as a story and more became a remix of the _idea_ of the story (if I'd had that idea the story I would have written, rather than my own version/take on the story that already exists). So I stripped it back and here we have my 'official' remix, the one I wrote for the deadline, the one I consider to fulfil the terms of the challenge. But the story wouldn't leave me alone, and I kept coming back to it and writing more. I vaguely thought it might be a sequel, but as I finished it before reveal I thought I'd add it as a second chapter. Whether you consider it as a bonus remix (it gets its own title because I feel it changes the whole story) or a sequel from a different POV or just ignore it entirely, is up to the reader. But once I started I couldn't not write it - I haven't felt that way about a story in years. So Redrikki, thank you for that.


	2. Hope Remains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magic Boxes (The Hope Remains Mix)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for _Age of Ultron_.

The funeral is, in Director Carter’s considered opinion, a complete shit-show. 

It’s perfectly well organised, military precision comes to mind, but this is very much a showpiece event. Orchestrated is perhaps the better word for it, Peggy thinks, very carefully orchestrated but by whom and for what purpose she can’t tell. 

Young Tony looks like a spikey, stunned ghost, being shepherded around by Obadiah Stane. She’s glad that someone senior at SI is looking out for the boy and keeping all the balls in the air at the company until the succession is sorted out. She has no reason to distrust Stane, he’d been Howard’s right-hand man for years, but somehow she’d feel better if it were Jarvis floating protectively at Tony’s shoulder instead. That unctuous, indulgent uncle attitude of Stane’s has always rubbed her the wrong way – so different from Jarvis, restrained and professional, but underlined with genuine warmth and affection for his charge. 

Jarvis himself is wryly amused by Stane’s antics, pointedly ignoring the way Stane carefully redirects Tony every time he drifts in Jarvis’ direction. Whatever his personal grief may be at the death of his employer-cum-oldest friend, he is clearly more worried about Tony. But whatever his feelings towards Stane – and there is clearly a certain amount of personal animosity between them – he is secure in his position, that soon enough Stane will be distracted by SI and he can get on with what has been his primary job these last twenty years - looking after Tony. 

“What can he do?” Jarvis asks, “Fire me? Deport me back to Britain? Tony would never stand for it, it would be the surest way for Stane to turn the boy against him. Don’t worry about me, Peggy.” 

“Be careful anyway, Edwin.” She instructs him. 

He dies of a heart attack within the year and she wonders if she gave him the wrong warning. 

Edwin Jarvis’ funeral is an entirely different affair. Smaller, more real somehow, just close friends and a few relatives from ‘home’. Tony is in full on charming Stark mode, but occasionally she sees the mask slip and gets a glimpse of the rawer less dutiful grief that is clearly just below the surface. 

Stane is notably absent, it’s a relief personally, but says something worrying that he’s failed to understand the importance of this event to Tony. 

“Director Carter,” Tony accosts her, “always a pleasure.”

There’s a definite tension about him, something combative and raw, and she could respond to it in a number of ways. She thinks about Jarvis and decides honesty is the best policy. She shakes her head, “I’m just plain Peggy Carter today Tony, I’m not here in an official capacity, I’m here for an old friends funeral.”

Tony pushes himself up onto the edge of a large marble planter beside her and offers a hand up to join him. She accepts it graciously, her knees aren’t what they were, and settles in beside him. He scans to room slowly before his gaze comes to rest where a few of the remaining Howling Commandos are reminiscing – her own husband amongst them. 

“You know the weird thing, Peggy,” he asks, “when I was at school, the other kids, they had this idealised view of the Howling Commandos and Captain America from the comics. I grew up with actual first hand accounts of their adventures, so why do I feel I got a less realistic account of them from himself?”

“Well, perhaps because those of us who knew the full details, knew exactly the dangers and horrors they were up against, we forgive them the things others wouldn’t because we know what was at stake.” Peggy suggests. 

“There was a boy in my class, Mark, who hated the comics more than I did,” Tony tells her, “his older brother loved them, had this massive collection that Mark wasn’t allowed to touch. I didn’t think about it until I went to visit one summer and I accidentally went into his brothers room – can’t remember what I was actually looking for – and his parents went ballistic. The room was immaculate, like someone had tidied it before he went away to school and he just hadn’t come back, but the weird thing, the really weird thing was the number of photos of the kid in the room. I thought it was a weird, vanity thing, but then I realised there were no photos beyond the age of 10.” 

He glances at her to make sure she’s following, and she is, she knows exactly where this is going and it breaks her heart. 

“Didn’t take much to figure it out, to ask the right questions to get to the truth. His brother had been dead since before he was born, but his parents still talked about him like he was just away at school. They had a freaking shrine in their house. You know how messed up it is that I understand that, that I could sympathise with having grown up in the shadow of a dead idealised older brother that you could never live up to?” Tony pauses to collect himself for a moment before he continues. “The best thing about Jarvis when I was growing up? I was never second best. If I screwed up he was disappointed on my behalf, he wasn’t constantly measuring me against someone else.”

Peggy wishes she could offer some comfort to Tony, something to explain his father to him. She suspects that anything she could say would either sound like excuses or hurt him more, so she settles for the truth. 

“He did love you, Tony. It’s the oldest cliché in the book, but he really didn’t have a clue how to show you that. He boasted about you constantly to other people, but he just couldn’t tell you himself…”

“Who?” He interrupts her to ask. 

“Tony,” she says softly, “you don’t need _me_ to tell you how much Jarvis cared about you.”

Tony’s slight sad smile tells her he knows, that he has spent an entire afternoon, being told in dozens of different ways how important he had been to Jarvis. That he never doubted it in the first place. 

“What am I doing, Peggy,” he asks, “whose legacy am I fulfilling? What is the actual point of all this money and power if I don’t actually have a choice in what I do with my life?”

“Go build your robots,” she tells him gently, “God knows your father never got to build his flying cars, one of you should get to be happy.” It’s as close as she can bring herself to telling him how miserable Howard had been for so long, she hopes its enough. 

“On one condition,” he offers, “promise you’ll come and see my robots some time.”

Peggy feels a real smile curve across her face. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” she assures him. 

She keeps her promise. It takes her longer than she intends to, but sometime during his final year she finds herself at a meeting at MIT. (She likes to recruit potential ‘mad scientists’, as she finds properly channelling their skills reduces considerably the incidence of super-villains they have to stop in the future.) With a few hours to kill and a deep desire to not be Director Carter for an hour or so, she heads over to Robotics to see if she can track down Tony. 

She’s in luck. Tony is both around and reasonably coherent, and she gets to meet his most successful robot to date. DUM-E is a helpful if…idiosyncratic robot. Puttering around tidying up after Tony and bumping into things occasionally to almost comical effect. Tony is doing some puttering of his own, showing off various on-going projects and talking a million miles an hour – hopped up on too much caffeine and too little sleep – occasionally breaking off to scold DUM-E for something or other. Around 80% of his interactions with DUM-E appears to be scolding, a stream of insults, invective and threats of dismantlement all delivered in a tone of voice so utterly affectionate that it takes her breath away. She’s heard people talk to their dogs like that (who’s a smelly mutt, you are, yes you’re so very stinky) while the dog frantically wags its tail, responding to tone rather than content, utter adoration in its eyes. The robot even stops next to Tony at one point, butting its claw against his hand, prompting Tony to pet DUM-E absently. All that money and privilege growing up and Howard clearly had never let the kid have a pet of his own. So he’d built his own, something that would love him unconditionally, something safe to love back because it wouldn’t die on him. 

She hates dealing with Stane – doesn’t trust him an inch – but she will gladly deal with him a bit longer if it means Tony gets this grace period with his robots. She can only hope it will be enough, that he’ll invent something that will take SI down another path. That she won’t have to watch the job destroy him the way it did his father. 

~

Peggy Carter watches the ‘I am Iron Man’ press conference from her room in her terribly exclusive care home. The shiny self-destructing ‘merchant of death’ is gone and in his place stands someone both stronger and more vulnerable than before. For the first time in a very long time she recognises the brilliant boy she remembers from long ago. She wonders if he would come and see her if she called now, come and show her his robots and paint her his dreams of clean, green limitless energy and world peace, they way his father had spoken of flying cars and a better world before the endless stream of new and inventive weaponry had driven his dreams from him. (“There’s always just one more weapon, one more war machine to make, Carter!” Howard shouts at her in her head, “when I’m gone Tony will take my place and we’ll just go round again. I wish I was leaving him a legacy of flying cars for him to build on with his beloved helper robots but that’s not the world we live in. We build magic boxes and weapons come out of them, its what we do best.”) She hopes Tony has found a way to reconcile his dreams with what the world wants from him. She hopes that he hasn’t just made his own magic box and turned himself into the weapon inside. Peggy hopes; its what keeps her going. 

~

This afternoon Peggy has a most unusual visitor. He’s quite the most singular young man she has met in a very long time. Yet he’s seems a little familiar. Not that that’s an unusual experience for Peggy these days, her memory isn’t what it was and sometimes she’ll know a face but be unable to place the name and others she will know instantly who someone is, but not how they connect to other people. (She struggles to match up the Captain Rogers that her niece Sharon worked with at SHIELD to the nice man who visits her regularly, let alone with the poor dear boy she lost to the ice all those years ago.) So no matter that she feels a little silly asking – she’s sure she would have remembered the crimson and gold skin, those piercing blue eyes – she needs to be certain.

“Have we met before, you seem strangely familiar?” she asks. 

He smiles, a little shy, a little pleased, she thinks, before replying. “No Ms Carter, we haven’t met previously, but I am given to understand that you have known my…father, for a great many years.”

“Ah,” she says, recalling the news flashes the nurses try to hide from her, terrible events in Sorkovia and Seoul, “Tony’s youngest. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Well that’s certainly an improvement on ‘Ultron’s non-evil twin’.” The young man comments wryly, “I am Vision. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call me a child of the Avengers, there is a little of most of them in me. But given how much of JARVIS went into forming my code and my personality, then yes I think Tony gets most of the credit or the blame depending who you ask. Perhaps one might say that I am Tony’s greatest creation and…well, I see you already know how that sentence ends.”

 _And his worst nightmare_ , the phrase hangs in the air between them, she never sees Tony without thinking of it. She forces herself to speak to dispel the desolation that has settled over her like a cloud of dust. 

“It was a phrase Howard used once about Tony to me. I hoped, that he had the sense to never actually tell his child that, but apparently not. And often enough that Tony would say it to you.” Peggy does not bother to hide the grief that rises up in her when she speaks.

“Don’t distress yourself Ms Carter,” Vision assures her, “Tony has never called me that, but the part of me that retains JARVIS’ memories recalls Tony using it to describe himself. It seemed apt given the circumstances. I suspect Howard Stark’s shadow has hung heavily over both of us these last few weeks. There was an…incident…with Thor’s hammer, ‘only he who be worthy’ and all that,” Vision smiles wryly, “there is some debate amongst certain of the Avengers as to mechanics and worthiness around my lifting the hammer…”

Peggy reaches out and cuts him off there with a finger to his lips. 

“Don’t,” she tells him, “Don’t you ever think that you’re not worthy. I don’t need some mythical weapon to tell me that about you. You’re a person worthy of love and respect. Never doubt that.” Peggy pauses to collect her scattered thoughts, “I don’t know you, but I’ve seen what you can do. You were built to be a weapon but you’re so much more than that. You chose to help people and save people, to live in a world that doesn’t understand you and I am so proud of you for that. I know all too well that sometimes the choices are between the least worst options but the choices still need to be made. Whatever you choose to do with your life, I will be proud of what you achieved just by existing.”

“Whether I decide to join the Avengers or not, I will always endeavour to make you proud, Ms Carter” Vision promises her solemnly. 

“Peggy,” she insists, tiredness bleeding into her voice now, “my name is Peggy.”

Vision is quiet for several long moments and Peggy is just on the cusp of sleep when he finally speaks again. 

“Thank you, Peggy.” 

_It's 8:15, and that's the time that it's always been  
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home_


End file.
